A Game of Murder (8 page)

“To put the program on the computer,” Emily responded impatiently. “We’ll be here all day if you don’t get a move on.”

Rok stepped up behind the couple. “Can I be of assistance?”

Faith decided now that Rok had the potentially incendiary situation under control, she should pay attention to getting Twine installed on her MacBook. She did that with a few keystrokes. A copy of the PowerPoint presentation and a ReadMe text file also resided on the flash drive. She’d check those out later. Meanwhile, she started creating passages and typing text into them.

The process was fairly intuitive. In practically no time at all, Faith sketched out ten rooms—or passages— on her screen, each with at least a rudimentary description and linked to at least one other passage. Knowing “build” was programmer-speak for creating a game, she clicked on the Build menu and did that. She then clicked on Test Play and started her game.

“I see you don’t need help.”

She jumped at the sound of Rok’s voice behind her. “It’s easy. Is that all there is to it? Moving around and reading instructions?”

“There’s a bit more than that, but not much. You can create variables and implement some simple logic statements like “if,” but if you want to do anything more complicated, you’ll need to use Inform.”

“How soon do we get to Inform?” Faith asked.

Rok slipped into the chair beside her gracefully. Faith wondered if he studied martial arts, or possibly dance. “Not until the next class at the earliest. I have to go slow enough for the senior citizens and our fiction writer”—he glanced in the direction of the girl—“who wrote some great descriptions, but doesn’t know anything about programming.”

Faith frowned, thinking of the paying work waiting for her at home. “How many weeks is this course?”

“I planned on four, but I’ve reserved the room for six in case I get behind or some of the students want to go longer. In actual time, the class will take at least eight weeks because we’ll only meet every other week. But you don’t have to wait for me if you don’t want to. Inform 7 is on the flash drive, so you can install it whenever you want. There’s a lot of documentation for Inform on the web. The club also has a Facebook group. Send me a friend request and I’ll add you to the group.” He bent forward as if to rise from the chair.

Faith didn’t want him to escape. This might be her only chance to talk to him alone. “Mira wrote a Twine game, didn’t she?” she said quickly.

Rok sank back in the chair. “Yeah. From what I heard, it was a pretty good one, too. At least that’s what Adam said.”

Faith couldn’t remember how Rok had voted at the meeting. “Were you in favor of admitting her game to the competition?” She studied him as he formulated his response.

Rok took a deep breath and let it out. His chocolate brown eyes stared at Faith as intensely as hers stared at him. “I’m not a fan of Twine games. I don’t think they really count as games since most of them don’t have an objective or a way to win. But I also don’t like the way Derek wants to keep women out of the club.”

Rok’s gaze roamed the room as if he were looking to see if one of the students needed help. Faith assumed his real motive was different.

He smoothed the front of his wrinkled blue shirt, focused his eyes on the young girl as he spoke. “Before Mira and her girlfriend showed up, Lorna was the only woman in the club. Derek was a lot harder on criticizing her games than even those Dennis wrote, which were pretty poor, full of bugs and typos, and silly without being funny.”

Rok brought his eyes back to hers. “If allowing Twine games is what it takes to bring more girls in, I’m in favor.”

Faith had a thought. “Were you romantically involved with Mira?”

“Me?” Rok’s mouth quirked up on one side. “Not hardly.” He huffed air through his nose, as if stifling a laugh. Faith wondered what was so funny.

“Anyway, I didn’t see the harm in letting them compete. I doubt a Twine game could win; Twine just doesn’t have the tools to write the best games.”

The chubby teen turned in his chair and stared at them.

“I’d better see if he needs help,” Rok said as he rose from the chair. “My email is in the ReadMe file if you need a hand getting started with Inform.”

* * *

Faith knew she should finish up some of her web business tasks—updating the performance schedule for the Prickly Pear for next month, adding the weeklong “Trail Riding for City Slickers” vacation package to the Crazy Creek Ranch site, tweeting and promoting her business on Facebook—but exploring the game resources Rok had pointed to on the flash drive interested her more. Besides, she told herself, she had to do her homework, didn’t she?

The homework assignment consisted of playing two Twine games, then one written in Inform, and thinking about what kind of game they wanted to write. The two Twine games were short, and Faith completed them rather quickly. The Inform game took her much longer. In fact, Faith wasn’t sure how far into it she progressed before stopping for a bathroom and snack break, because she suspected she hadn’t discovered all the puzzles she needed to solve.

As Rok had guessed, she preferred the Inform game style. She felt more involved with the game, a feeling of being connected to some other intelligence whom she was battling against, even if the “intelligence” was only a computer program. She’d spent most of her career fighting with computers—and winning—so she felt right at home. In Twine, your choices were limited to what the designer included. In Inform, your choices seemed infinite. The game might not understand what you typed, but it always responded. In fact, some of the responses made her laugh out loud, while others made her pause and think.

Munching on an oatmeal cookie as she made her way back to her office, she wondered what Mira’s game was like. Instead of going back to the Inform game, she ran a web search for
Sartre in Love
, the title of Mira’s controversial game. Not surprisingly, Adam’s blog review came up first in the search results. The listings on the rest of the page unsettled her. Those consisted of links to gaming group posts, other bloggers’s responses to Adam’s original review, and Facebook links, most of which were irate tirades against the game from the little she could see. A link to the game itself appeared close to the bottom of the search page.

She clicked on the link to the game.

You are standing in the middle of a room. A candle in a brass candlestick with a handle sits at your feet, providing only enough light to see your shoes and a small distance around them. The floor is made of black marble. Outside the cone of light, all is dark.

> Step forward.

> Pick up the candlestick.

Faith had figured out stepping into the dark in text adventures was never a good idea, so she chose the option to pick up the candlestick.

A voice speaks to you out of the darkness. “I love you, Pat.”

You hear the roar of a rushing wind approaching.

> Say “I love you, too.”

> Step forward.

One option seemed as good as the other, so Faith clicked on Step forward. Saying I love you to a complete stranger didn’t come naturally to her. She reflected on how long it had taken her to say those words to John.

You step through a doorway. As the wind roars into the room you left, the door between here and there slams shut behind you. You are alone. An aching emptiness overtakes your soul. You have never been so bereft in your life.

> Go back.

> Go forward.

The mood of the game seeped into Faith’s mind, despair flowing through her and weighing on her chest like an ingot of lead. It appeared leaving the person who loved you was a bad idea.

She clicked on “Go back”.

The door has locked behind you. There’s a keyhole, but you have no key to put in it. Hopelessness weighs on your heart.

> Go forward

> Knock on the door

Faith chose to knock on the door.

No one answers. Either your knock can’t be heard or your true love, heartbroken you did not stay, abandoned all hope of winning your affection. You wonder what you might have missed and if there is any way of getting back to your heart’s desire. Because you know now the person you left is the love of your life. No one could replace that person.

Faith restarted the game and tried the other option, then went back to her first choice and tried to see if she could find a key or reconcile with “her true love” in any other way. She found several alternate trails, even found the key one time, but the mood of the game remained dark. In true existentialist fashion, there seemed to be no positive outcome to the game.

She leaned back in her chair, her mind swirling like a whirlpool, the dark atmosphere of the game threatening to drag her under and into its black depths to drown. She found herself reliving the news of Karl’s passing, the long trip back to New York for his funeral, the grief of losing both father and brother to too-early deaths.

She fought off the anguish, squeezed back the tears, inflated her lungs to push the weight which threatened to smother her off of her chest.

If Mira hadn’t so clearly been murdered, Faith might have suspected suicide as the cause of her death. She understood now what made the game so controversial. By no means a traditional text adventure, it could be seen as breaking new ground. Or it could be seen as female emotional angst. Adam probably saw the game the first way, Derek and friends the second.

Did Cathy, by all appearances Mira’s best friend, know how Mira felt? Had she suggested therapy?

Faith made another trip to the kitchen and grabbed a handful of cookies. She needed fortification before taking the next step. Seated at her computer again, she returned to the search page and clicked on one of the forum links. She took a bite of cookie while the page loaded.

CRITIC TRADES SEX FOR GOOD REVIEW
screamed across the top of the screen. A tirade filled with accusations that Mira had slept with Adam in exchange for a rave review of her game followed. According to the post, he hadn’t evaluated the game itself, but his experience in bed with the designer.

Faith swallowed the remaining bit of oatmeal cookie left in a mouth suddenly gone dry. She’d lived long enough to know work was not always judged on its merits, had herself been the victim of an unfair evaluation of her work because of favoritism, but never had she seen such vitriol used in the process.

If the original post was bad, the responses were worse. The vocabulary consisted primarily of curse words, many of them sexual references. The further into the thread Faith got, the worse things became, threatening rape and injury to a woman who dared to break the mold of what these troglodytes considered a “real” game. Several posts threatened death, either by infecting Mira with an STD or by overt violence. The cookie churned in Faith’s stomach.

She got off that site and clicked on the second link. And felt like she’d stepped into the Twilight Zone.

This thread grew even more vituperative, not only suggesting doing harm to Mira, but also advocating doxxing her. This must be the one Lorna told her about. One of the posters had responded less than an hour later with Mira’s home address and phone number. Links that purportedly led to naked photographs of her came next. Faith didn’t click on them to verify whether they delivered what they promised.

Upset by the postings, she’d clenched the hand holding the cookies so tightly the last one turned into crumbs. She leaned forward and unclenched her fist, letting the crumbs drop into the wastebasket beside her desk.

A bass drum pounded in her head. Where did that kind of hate come from? How could so many people harbor so much anger about something that was supposed to be fun?

The list of suspects had grown infinitely longer.

No, it hadn’t, she corrected herself. A killer still needed motive, means, and opportunity. While the number of gamers with an expressed desire to kill Mira had increased, only one of the select few at the meeting could have poisoned her salad. But which one?

John wrestled the steering wheel of his truck, trying to keep it centered in the ruts of the dirt road that led out to his property in the desert east of town. Not always successfully. The ride was hardly smooth even when he was successful, as evidenced by the sudden drop the truck took when the front end plummeted off a rock that suddenly appeared under the right front tire.

“Ouch!” Faith rubbed the back of her head. “I thought it was called a headrest, not a head basher.”

John didn’t dare turn his eyes from the road to see if she was serious or joking. He needed them riveted on the dirt track, his hands tightly clasped to the wheel. The muscles in his arms felt like the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, supporting the tons of tension required to avoid diving into a ditch. “Sorry. Next time I’ll bring you a helmet.”

He glanced quickly in the rearview mirror to check how Walt was doing in the truck behind him. Walt hit the drop even harder, and John grimaced in sympathetic pain. He’d have to do something about the road once the tire house was finished and they were using it for church retreats. He could just imagine Lois Huffington’s reaction to having to bounce over the current access way.

“Maybe we should have taken your dirt bike,” Faith said.

John dared a quick peek at her. She was grinning. He loosened his grip on the steering wheel, and not only because the road had at last smoothed out. “I don’t think you would have liked balancing the toilet on your head.”

Faith laughed out loud. “I suppose not.”

The purpose of this trip was to install a composting toilet in the partially built tire house, largely for the comfort of the women, but John wasn’t totally opposed to having the convenience and privacy of a proper place to relieve himself while working on the building. Trees grew few and far between in this section of the desert, and a saguaro cactus wasn’t quite the same.

Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, and his back itched as the sun beat down through the windows on his dark brown shirt. He should have picked one lighter in color.